Security experts warn AG Barr is trying to use foreign governments to ‘undermine’ FBI’s Russia investigation: ‘This is a gross abuse of power’

When Attorney General William Barr was confirmed by the U.S. Senate earlier this year, his supporters noted he had previously held that position under President George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s and insisted that he would conduct himself like a traditional Republican rather than a Trump loyalist. But Barr has turned out to be very much a Trump loyalist, and an October 17 article by security experts James Lamond and Talia Dessel for Just Security outlines the ways in which Barr, with the help of U.S. Attorney John Durham, has been trying to use foreign governments to “undermine the FBI’s decision to open an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.”

“This effort is an abuse of power, purely designed to help President Donald Trump politically,” Lamond and Dessel warn. “The fact is, it would have been malpractice if the FBI had not opened its investigation in the summer of 2016.”

In his final report for the Russian investigation, former special counsel Robert Mueller made it clear that the Russian government aggressively interfered in 2016’s presidential election — and Mueller has warned that he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin and his supporters plan to do the same thing again in 2020. But Lamond and Dessel (both known for their expertise on intelligence and Russia-related matters) stress that Barr and Durham aren’t trying to “contest the findings of the Mueller investigation” but rather, are trying to “prove that the trigger for the FBI launching its original inquiry into Russian interference was, in fact, a set-up.”

View the complete October 17 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.